Surprise: No Increase in Car Insurance Premium

By Sun

Last February, I had a little incident on the way to work: I was pulled over for speeding out side our house. After delaying my court appearance for almost three months, I eventually went to see the judge and settled my case. The price was a fine of $220 plus two points. I got some suggestions on how I can eliminate the points and prevent my auto insurance premium from going up after posting my story, but lot of things have been going on and I never got time to follow any of the suggestions. So the points stay. Naturally, I expected that our auto insurance premium could go up due to the incident.

Yesterday, the car insurance renewal package from Ameriprise arrived and to my surprise, not only the premium for 2008 doesn’t increase, it actually comes down a little. In January 2007, when I switched our auto and home insurances from Liberty Mutual to Ameriprise, the premium for a half-year coverage of our two cars was $559, one car with full coverage and the other liability only. The new rate for 2008 is $555 in total, with the $4 reduction from our Odyssey.

Well, it’s always possible that if I didn’t have that incident and hadn’t been assessed two points, my rate could be lowered even more. I don’t know if that would really be the case, because in the past 10 years, I almost never saw my rate go down even when I didn’t have any violation. It either kept going up (like my first insurer Amica which eventually forced to switch provider) or stayed the same (Liberty Mutual). So I was pleasantly surprised to see a bill the same size as last year. At least it won’t make me regret for not taking an action

*Photo from Safeauto.

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The same thing happened to me. I got in a bad accident and it wasn’t my fault but I still expected my insurance to go up. To my delight it didn’t. I love it when something happens, you expect the worst and it leads to a happy ending.

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